and the hint of tusks rather than teeth.
“Watch this,” Alexis said, and she rotated the disk one-eighty, so the peccary features were upside down. The action revealed a second set of eyes, nose, and mouth—another face hidden in the frown lines and shapes of the first. In the second incarnation, the pig-man was smiling and looked, if not happy, then at least at peace with himself and what had happened to cause his death.
It wasn’t a Mayan death mask, as the auction catalog had probably stated. It was Nightkeeper made, as proven by the mark of the boar in the lower corner, a match to the bloodline glyph on Rabbit’s arm.
“Nostalgic indeed,” Nate said, but this time he wasn’t teasing. Instead he felt a beat of grief for a lost comrade.
Red-Boar had been a prickly bastard, and he’d sucked as a role model and father, but he’d been one of the team. He’d been killed in the tunnels beneath Chichen Itza, when one of the lesser
“It spoke to me,” Alexis said of the mask. Looking at Jox, who was the unofficial arbiter of all purchases and decorating decisions around Skywatch, save for their personal quarters, she said, “I thought maybe we could hang it in here, or in the training hall, as a reminder. Sort of like having him looking down on us.”
Jox looked to Strike. “Cool by you?”
“It’s really Rabbit’s call,” the king answered.
The teen looked startled for a second, then thoughtful. Finally he nodded. “Yeah.” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Yeah, the old man’d get a kick out of that. Just . . . just make sure he can see the ceiba tree, okay? It was . . . it mattered to him.”
The tree in question, a big sucker nearly fifty feet high and about as wide, grew where the Nightkeepers’ Great Hall had stood before the massacre. In the aftermath of the attack, before he’d enacted the spell that’d banished the training compound from the face of the earth for more than two decades, Jox had piled the bodies in the Great Hall and set it ablaze as a funeral pyre. When Strike and Red-Boar had reversed the spell twenty-four years later, they’d found the ceiba tree rooted in the ashes of the fallen Nightkeepers. The tree, which the Maya and Nightkeepers had revered as the symbol of community, believing that the roots stretched to the underworld and that the branches held up the sky, was native to the Yucatan and Central America. It shouldn’t have been able to grow in the arid box canyon, and it sure as hell couldn’t have gotten so big in the time it had. But there it was.
And yeah, it mattered. Even to someone like Nate, who didn’t believe in looking back.
“The training hall it is, then,” Alexis said, looking pleased, as though she hadn’t been sure how her impulse buy was going to go over. Then she reached for the statuette. “Well, I guess I should introduce you to Ixchel. I sure hope she was worth—” The moment she touched the statuette, she stiffened, her mouth opening in a round O of surprise.
“Alexis?” Nate’s gut tightened as magic danced across his skin. Before any of the others could react, he shot out a hand, intending to pull hers away from the statuette. But the moment he touched her his muscles locked.
And the world around him disappeared.
CHAPTER THREE
Power burned up Alexis’s arm and gathered in her core, spinning and expanding and taking over until there was only the power. She didn’t know where she was, couldn’t see anything but darkness, couldn’t feel anything but magic. Worse, she couldn’t lock on, couldn’t jack in and use what little magic she possessed to get free. She could only hang suspended in the nothingness.
Panic gripped her. She would’ve fought but she couldn’t move; would’ve screamed, but she couldn’t make a sound.
Gulping for air, though it seemed she wasn’t actually breathing, she fought to slow her racing brain, struggled to think it through. She’d given the death mask to Rabbit, turned to lift the statuette from the case, and then—
A flash of vibrant color, a kaleidoscope of vivid hues. Then nothing.
She’d touched the statuette, and the contact had sent her . . . where? She wasn’t in the barrier; she knew that much. There was no gray-green mist, no squishy surface underfoot and gray-green sky above. There was no up or down where she’d been transported, no surface or sky. There was just blackness and power. Then, suddenly, the colors returned in shimmering ribbons of light. They caressed her, curled around her, then dissipated. When they cleared she was in a ceremonial chamber she’d never seen before.
She stood on a slender ledge that ran along one side of the narrow room. A vaulted stone ceiling arched overhead, spanning a rectangular pool of dark water. Stalactites hung down in gorgeous stone droplets, and stalagmites thrust up from the water, causing the sluggish flow to eddy and swirl in overlapping ripple patterns. Light came from torches that were set in stone sconces on either side of the narrow room. In the flickering illumination, she saw that the room was closed at either end, creating a long, narrow arcade with water instead of a floor. There were no doors or windows, but the torch smoke, which smelled faintly of sacred incense, moved along the ceiling to a narrow crack halfway down one of the long walls.
One entire short side was taken up with an elaborate thronelike structure built out of limestone blocks and carved from the living subterranean stone itself. She wasn’t sure if it was a throne or an altar; the flat space in the middle could have served as either. Arching columns rose up on either side, carved with a serpent and feather pattern that made her think of Kulkulkan, along with a sinuous motif she didn’t recognize. The other three walls and the vaulted ceiling were carved with human figures, not the intricate hieroglyphs used for writing, but a single extended scene, a grand mural of Mayan men and women with the flattened, elongated foreheads that had been created early in childhood with binding boards, and the exaggerated cheekbones and noses often made from clay or jade, all of it intended to make the wearer look more like a god. Hundreds of figures were carved on either side of the black pool, some bowing or kneeling, others raising their hands in supplication. All of them faced the throne at the far end.
Overhead, the archway and the stalactites themselves were carved with rippling patterns of feathers and scales and that same wavy motif, which gave the impression of wind, or the gods, or both. Some the rippling lines were painted with brilliant reds and blues, vibrant yellows and purples, oranges and greens, the hues shining impossibly true in the amber torchlight.
Drawn by the captured motion of the carvings, Alexis walked along the narrow stone ledge that ran around the pool, moving toward the throne. As she passed, her shadow danced in the flickering torchlight, making the carvings seem to come alive, to reach for her. She thought she heard them whisper her name in the soft rippling noise coming from the water.
They didn’t whisper, “Alexis,” though. They said something else, something that called to her, made her feel as though she were a stranger to herself. Indeed, she was wearing a stranger’s clothes—
not the jeans and shirt she’d put on in place of her ruined suit back at Skywatch, but combat wear of stretchy black-on-black that molded itself to her figure and moved with her.
She had seen this before, she realized suddenly. This was what she remembered when she awoke sobbing softly, hearing her mother’s voice. In the dreams, she hadn’t been sure if she was her mother or herself, or someone else entirely. Only now, unlike in the dreams, her senses were heightened rather than dulled by the mists of her subconscious. The crunch of limestone gravel beneath her feet was very loud, the alkaline smell of the water very sharp, and the prickle of moisture on her skin—from the air, from her pores—left her nerve endings acutely sensitized.
And as she walked to the throne, she knew she was alone, yet not alone.
